Thabo Bester, ‘The Facebook Rapist’ and prison escapee, now faces criminal charges. Bester, who ran a business from jail, escaped from Mangaung Prison last year, having faked his suicide.
 
What exactly has been going on at Mangaung Prison, and for how long? And who knew? Ruth Hopkins’ book, The Misery Merchants: Life and Death in a Private South African Prison, tells the shocking story of Mangaung Prison.
 
Ruth Hopkins’s brave and extraordinary book, The Misery Merchants: Life and Death in a Private South African Prison is an exposé of Mangaung Prison, a privatised prison, run by G4S, the largest security firm in the world. Hopkins’s story of a broken prison, in which prisoners were forcibly given anti-psychotic drugs and tortured with electric shock ‘therapy’, also details the flow of money in and out of the prison, the links with MPs, and the shocking ‘governance’ of the prison by G4S.

This work was produced under the auspices of the Wits Justice Project (WJP), an investigative journalism project of the Journalism Department at the University of the Witwatersrand.

The WJP investigates miscarriages of justice within the South African criminal justice system such as wrongful convictions, torture in prisons, prison conditions and other human rights abuses. The WJP’s objective is to contribute towards the improvement of the criminal justice system in South Africa and its conformity with the Constitution and international law.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ruth Hopkins is an award-winning investigative journalist based in South Africa. She worked as a journalist and editor with the Wits Justice Project in Johannesburg from 2012 to 2018, producing content about wrongful convictions, lengthy remand detention, police brutality and various other criminal justice issues. Ruth wrote a book on trafficking women into Europe, I will never let you go again (published in 2005) based on five years of research in Albania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and the Netherlands.

The Misery Merchants: Life and Death in a Private South African Prison is published by Jacana Media